Sovereign (80 page)

I laughed sadly. ‘When I recovered from my fever and learned Wrenne had been buried in London with none but you and Tamasin and Joan at his funeral, I had a crazed idea of having the body
exhumed and burying him again down here. Guilt, I suppose.’ I pointed at the gravestone. ‘They were his grandparents, after all. And King Edward IV’s,’ I added.

‘You owe him nothing,’ Barak said.

‘It was a crazed notion, as I said; perhaps I was still a little delirious.’

‘You should feel no guilt over him.’ Barak paused. ‘Nor over your father.’

I nodded slowly. ‘No. You are right. I have paid my father’s mortgage, put a fine marble headstone over his grave. I shall visit it soon. But I see now that we were always distant,
always apart. That was the way it was and there is no point in regretting it now.’

‘No.’

‘But I wanted to come here. To see. I still cannot quite come to terms with how Giles lied to me, tried to kill me at the end. But that is foolish, people betray each other all the time
and for far lesser causes than he believed he had.’

‘What will you do with his library?’

‘I do not know.’ We had found Wrenne’s will with his possessions. No mention of his dead nephew, of course. He had bequeathed everything to Madge except the library, which he
had left to me as he had promised. ‘I do not want it. But there are certain things – a picture, perhaps some other items – that should be destroyed.’ I looked at him.
‘Will you do that? Go to York again for me, now the winter is ending? Madge plans to keep living in the house, her attorney’s letter said.’

He made a face. ‘Visit the damp demesne of York again? Eat her pottage? Only if I must.’

‘After you have done that I think I will get in touch with Master Leland the antiquarian, see if there is anything he wants. I suppose you had better bring back the old lawbooks.
Gray’s Inn library could use those.’ I smiled mirthlessly. ‘There may be some old forgotten cases there that I can quote in court.’

‘I might see Maleverer there. Now he has lost his place on the Council of the North I can thumb my nose at the arsehole.’

I laughed. ‘That he would not like. I suspected him for a while, you know. But you were right, he was too stupid to plot anything. There was nothing behind that bluster of his, he was an
empty vessel. Yes, thumb your nose if you see him.’

Barak looked at me. ‘There is something I have been meaning to tell you. Now might be a good time.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘I have asked Tamasin to marry me.’

‘It did not take her too long to bring you round, then.’

‘No.’ He laughed. ‘She has agreed.’ He looked down, nudging a loose stone with his boot. ‘And we were careless. It seems I may have a son myself before long.’
He laughed again, embarrassed. ‘Perhaps one day someone will make him king. He could start another reformation, bring England back to the faith of my Jewish ancestors.’

‘That would be something.’ I looked at him. ‘You are sure it is what you want, this marriage?’

‘Yes,’ he said decidedly.

‘You will suit each other well. Perhaps she will make you tidier in your habits when she is mistress of your home, and we shall have a neater office.’

‘She can try.’

‘Thank you for all you did,’ I said quietly. ‘At York and afterwards. You stayed steadfast and loyal, while I was unfair to Tamasin.’

‘’S all right.’ He smiled. ‘ ’Tis time to settle down at last. Unless you grub up more adventures.’

‘Never,’ I said. ‘Never again so long as I live. But I have grubbed up something else.’

‘Oh?’

‘Cranmer has written to me. I think he feels guilty for my time in the Tower, perhaps for cozening me into that job in York in the first place. He is a complicated man. I think the things
he feels he must do bring him disquiet, in a way they never did to Thomas Cromwell. There is a vacancy for an advocate in the Court of Requests, and he has put my name forward. Things are changing
again. The Duke of Norfolk has lost his place now Queen Catherine has fallen. His whole family are in disgrace. The reformers like Cran-mer have access to patronage again. The pay could be better,
but anyway it will suffice now I have paid off that damned mortgage on my father’s farm. I will be working for common folk, ordinary people. I think I would like that.’

He smiled. ‘No more arse-licking to rich clients.’

I laughed. ‘No.’

‘Then I’d like it too.’

I rubbed my hands together. ‘Then shall we start with Sergeant Leacon, get his family their lands back?’

‘Yes.’ Barak extended his hand, and I shook it. Not all men betray, I thought. We turned away, leaving the true ancestors of our false King to their eternal rest.

The major political significance of Henry VIII’s great Progress to the North of 1541 has been largely overlooked by historians, perhaps distracted by the wholly
unexpected exposure just afterwards of Catherine Howard’s liaison with Thomas Culpeper. In
Sovereign
I have followed David Starkey’s interpretation of their relationship (
Six
Wives
, 2003), that it probably went no further than flirtation. Cranmer was the key figure in Catherine’s interrogation, and her downfall was a setback for the religious conservatives at
Henry’s court, especially her uncle the Duke of Norfolk. Henry’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr, whom he married a year later, was a strong reformist.

I have made one alteration to historical fact: Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk was in fact co-organizer of the Progress along with the Duke of Suffolk and was present in York. However, as he
featured so prominently in the last Shardlake novel,
Dark Fire
, I thought it would overcomplicate the plot if I brought him back in a minor role here. While Henry VIII did seek petitions for
justice along the route, I have invented the arbitrations in York.

The Progress was indeed beset by cold weather and unremitting rain in July, and calling it off was discussed. I have, however, invented the stormy weather of October 1541.

*

The north of England had never been fully reconciled to Tudor rule. Under pressure of changing trade patterns, falling wages and the enclosure movement, discontent grew in the
early sixteenth century until the religious changes of the 1530s brought the commons of the doctrinally conservative region to rebel in October 1536. Within weeks, an army of perhaps 30,000 armed
northerners was camped on the river Don, prepared to march south, collect support and remove Cromwell, Cranmer and Rich from the council.

Henry broke his promises to meet some of the rebels’ demands if they disbanded, and ruthlessly suppressed fresh outbreaks of rebellion in 1537. Robert Aske and the other leaders of the
Pilgrimage of Grace were executed. There are conflicting accounts on whether Robert Aske was hanged in chains and left to die at York Castle, or whether he was granted a speedier death. I think he
was hanged in chains; for Henry VIII to keep his promise that Aske would be dead ere his head was struck off in such a macabre way seems to me exactly in tune with the King’s character.

After 1536, the dissolution of the larger monasteries, which meant the seizure of their resources by the Crown and the remittance of rents and profits to London, together with the effects of
heavy taxation in 1540–1, caused further economic distress and religious discontent. Anger can only have festered deeper in 1537–41, for all that things seemed quiet. The revived
Council of the North in York, set up to maintain royal control there, would almost certainly have operated a network of informers. Sir William Maleverer is a fictional character, but I think he was
probably not untypical. And in early 1541 a conspiracy was uncovered. It was planned by a group of gentry and ex-religious and was to start with a rising at Pontefract Fair in April. The limited
evidence indicates that the 1541 rebels were prepared to go further than those of 1536 – the French ambassador Marillac reported to Philip V that they called the King a tyrant; surely this
indicated they intended to dethrone him. Even more surprising and dangerous, Marillac reported that they were prepared to make an alliance with the still Catholic Scots. Northern English people
looked on the Scots as uncivilized, dangerous barbarians (exactly the way the southern English looked on the northern English), and the conspirators’ anger must have been desperate indeed to
consider allying with the ancient enemy. There was no evidence of a link to conservative Gray’s Inn lawyers in 1541, though there may have been one in 1536; I have revived this aspect for my
plot.

The prospect of another army of northern rebels marching towards London, this time perhaps accompanied by the Scots, and perhaps even the Scots’ allies the French, must have been the
ultimate nightmare for the Henrician state. Foreign ambassadors reported in 1541 that the English rulers were even more alarmed than they had been in 1536. After the Pilgrimage of Grace, a Royal
Progress to the North had been mooted, but the idea was shelved. Now it was quickly revived, and Henry’s anxiety is indicated by the extraordinary speed with which the gigantic Progress was
organized – it set out three months after the conspiracy was exposed. This was a remarkable feat, for not only was it at least three times the size of a normal Progress, not only did it
travel much further than a royal Progress had since the 1480s, but it was an armed Progress, with a thousand soldiers accompanying the King and England’s artillery shipped to Hull. Meanwhile,
the heir of the alternative (and Catholic) royal line, the Countess of Salisbury, was butchered in the Tower without trial.

*

For details of how the Progress looked, sounded and smelt I have had to rely on the books cited below, and on my imagination, to flesh out the limited information provided by
the French ambassador Marillac’s reports and other records in the
Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII
. The portrayal of the supplication of the City of York at Fulford Cross
is based on the official account in the York civic records.

What struck me forcefully, reading the state papers, were the many indications that the King and his advisers were frightened they might meet with hostility and even violence in the north. The
organizers made certain that the gentry and city councillors who came to submit themselves along the way, both in the towns and in rural stopping-places, came in numbers limited by them.
Henry’s soldiers were always there.

This most political of Progresses was brilliantly choreographed. The local ruling classes would meet Henry and Queen Catherine along the way, make gifts to them, and those who had rebelled in
1536 would read long submissions begging forgiveness before taking fresh oaths of loyalty. Oaths were vitally important in Tudor times; those who swore knew for sure they had the King’s
forgiveness for the past, but equally that if they broke their oaths their fate would be terrible. And no doubt favours and positions were handed out behind the scenes. The attempt to bring James
IV of Scotland into an English alliance failed, however; the following year a decade of aggressive warfare against Scotland began.

The ordinary people who had created the great army of 1536, and could have formed another in 1541, played no part other than as spectators. The whole strategy was based on the belief that if
Henry could decisively win the loyalty of the northern elites, he would be safe. It worked; there were no more rebellions in Yorkshire in Tudor times. In 1541, however, given the prevailing mood in
the north, I think there must have been some hostility to the Progress among the commons, and this is the mood I have portrayed in York; a sullen populace who, as the city records show, drove the
council to their wits’ end by refusing to lay sand and ashes before their doors to ease the King’s passage through the streets.

*

The Blaybourne story, remarkable as it may seem, is founded on fact. There is evidence that Cecily Neville, mother of the Yorkist kings Edward IV and Richard III, claimed that
Edward IV was not fathered by the Duke of York, and rumours at the French court identified the father as an English archer named Blaybourne. Michael K. Jones’s
Bosworth 1485
(Tempus
Publishing, 2002) relates the story, which was also told in a Channel 4 documentary,
Britain’s Real Monarch
(2004). They traced the man who would be the rightful King today if Cecily
spoke true, an amiable Australian sheep farmer (and republican) who would be King Michael I. I am not entirely convinced that Cecily Neville spoke the truth; I think there are flaws in some of Dr
Jones’s lines of argument, particularly on possible dates of conception for Edward IV. But it might be true. Certainly the story was known to Thomas Cromwell; the Spanish ambassador Chapuys
asked him about it in 1535, perhaps to annoy him.

What is still true – astonishingly, in the twenty-first century – is that Queen Elizabeth II retains the title Henry VIII took for himself: Supreme Head of the Church of England,
Defender of the Faith and – in theory at least – God’s chosen representative in England.

I am very grateful to the staff of the libraries of York City Council, East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire County Councils, and the Universities of Sussex and London, for their
help in locating research materials about the Progress of 1541. The Richard III Society, American Branch, enabled me to download the
Titulus Regulus
from their website. The highlights of a
research trip to York were the remarkable re-creation of a late-fifteenth-century house at Barley Hall in the city centre, and the excellent and imaginative exhibition on St Mary’s Abbey at
the Yorkshire Museum. I am most grateful to Warwick Burton of York Walks for a very informative tour of King’s Manor and for his help with subsequent queries, to Robert Edwards for driving me
across the route of the Progress from York to Hull, to Rev. Nigel Stafford for showing me round the lovely old church at Howlme-on-Spalding Moor, and to Mrs Ann Los for sharing her information on
Leconfield Castle. Andrew Belshaw kindly found Arnold Kellett’s
The Yorkshire Dictionary
(Smith Settle, 2002) for me, which was very helpful on matters of dialect. Thanks also to
Jeanette Howlett for taking me on a visit to the Sussex Working Horse Trust, where I learned much about the type of horses that moved the Progress across England; to Dr Jeremy Bending, who kindly
advised me about Wrenne’s cancer, and to Mike Holmes, who corrected my wildly inaccurate notions about what the sea journey would have been like. Needless to say, any errors in interpreting
the wealth of helpful information I was given are my own.